Remember App Inventor? It was one of the casualties of the Google Labs kill order that came down late last year. However the WYSIWYG app building tool got a reprieve at the last minute from MIT, who in turn received a donation from Google to help establish the MIT Center for Mobile Learning.

The MIT group reached one of their first goals late Friday with the initial release of the App Inventor source code. It’s freely available here to check out, and MIT will be occassionaly updating it to match what they are doing in-house.

Documentation is fairly sparse at the moment; the majority of their focus is on getting their large-scale public server up and running by April. But if you want to start playing now, there’s a Google group that appears fairly active already.

If you want to get into the tester group that’s working with the latest updates MIT has, you can still request access here. But don’t expect to hear anything immediately. The list is quite long, and they don’t want to overload the service.

We’ll keep tabs on the service as it gets closer to the full public release this Spring.

That is a bit of a concern this time around as I’m sure at least some of the implementations will allow you to export in a form that can be uploaded to the Market, but as long as they try to keep learning after they make their fart app I guess I’m ok with it.

Glad this is sticking around. While there will be an abundance of fart apps and “hot girls” wallpaper apps, this tool can definitely enable some creative people. Maybe I’ll finally sit down and learn to use it properly… if they let me.

That is a bit of a concern this time around as I’m sure at least some of the implementations will allow you to export in a form that can be uploaded to the Market, but as long as they try to keep learning after they make their fart app I guess I’m ok with it.

Glad this is sticking around. While there will be an abundance of fart apps and “hot girls” wallpaper apps, this tool can definitely enable some creative people. Maybe I’ll finally sit down and learn to use it properly… if they let me.